Girl in a band (2015): Kim Gordon writes her memoir as a therapy, but not as a diary
“What is it like to be a girl in a band?
I don’t quite understand
That’s so quaint to hear
I feel so faint my dear”
Lyrics from Sonic Youth’s Sacred Trickster , found in the album The Eternal (2009)
Kim Althea Gordon, better known as Kim Gordon, has been one of the most influential women in music and visual arts. She was for more than three decades, the bass player of the noise punk band Sonic Youth. Because she was the only woman* in a group renowned for musical experimentation and innovation, she attracted a lot of attention from fans and the media, but her soft and mysterious mood had never revealed who the woman behind the stage was . Kim wrote her autobiography in a bitter tone. Bitter not only because she was exhausted from being seen only as the badass girl from the coolest band you listen to, but also because this identity was part of something much greater: being a woman artist enabled her to reflect and seek beyond what is reserved for women.
When you start reading “Girl in the Band”, you notice that Gordon turns her words into sharp knives. Talking about the condition of a woman in a marriage seems a painful thing for many of us, since we internalize this type of institution as synonymous for happiness and feminine fulfillment. However, she breaks with the mythical image that was built over the years of her marriage to the guitarist, vocalist and alongside her, co-founder of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore. Her aggressive tone is of an unresolved grief, and her grief doesn’t even end at the end of the book because it extends to a much larger problem in which male infidelity is only a small part of it. Many people criticized the biography negatively because of Kim’s insistence on talking about Thurston’s betrayal. As much as it is true, we need to be sensitive to her pain. Her freedom didn’t come either with marriage or with separation. Kim Gordon makes it very clear from the earliest chapters that she grew up in vivid environments, moving to various places that encouraged her autonomy and artistic growth. There is also her relationship with her troublesome brother, who made her feel small and silenced. Thus, her contact with Art was her true liberation. Her tense and yet tender voice reveals a woman sensitive to the world around her, and this same sensitivity awakened her to what was right and wrong, and she could, like a few women, shout out what was wrong and be heard because she was a girl in a band.
The multi-artist found herself among New York outsiders. Every writer who decides to narrate the city, has a place where he/she** puts his/her** feet and calls it his/hers**. In Kim’s case, she brought along bits of different places and took time to find her own New York. Sonic Youth played all over the world, but they have a remarkable history in the city that never sleeps and as it marks the first steps of the band. Kim talks about it in such a detailed way that we understand why the band lasted so long and was so stable in several aspects.
There is a nuance of the author that is important to note: her critical observation of other bands led her to shape her own voice and style as an artist. That’s why she mentions her admiration for the riot grrrl movement and especially for Kathleen Hanna, the former lead singer of Bikini Kill, since riot grrrls refused to give in to the mainstream. The calmness of the other members of Sonic was only interrupted when Lee and Kim disagreed, or when Thurston was in a bad mood, but creativity was always there. Kim also discusses the arduous beginning of the group. Problems with sound picking, the change of drummers and sharing vans with problematic bands, such as Swans, did not discourage them; on the contrary, it seemed that the more things seemed to go wrong, they would result in Sonic’s greatest triumphs. Being immersed in this vast underground world through a feminine perspective is the highlight of the book. Before Sonic Youth, Kim ventured into all female avant-garde bands and threw herself into art interventions and magazine writing. Her struggle for small spaces is a vital inspiration for young women who enter adulthood and feel lost. When Kim remembers how she consolidated her place in society, she does not do it arrogantly, her message is that we never know who we really are at 20 or 30, but to take risks and believe in ourselves and in what we do speaks much more about ourselves than any attempt to label who we are.
Like many regular fans of Sonic Youth, we were anxious to get to the chapters in which Kim talks about Goo and Dirty, certainly flawless albums that marked the peak of the band. It was early 1990’s and the seeds of grunge and riot grrrl were ready to germinate as the voices of the generation. Nirvana toured with Sonic Youth in Europe and this is recorded in the documentary that changed my life, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. Other bands that would later emerge when grunge became mainstream like Babes in Toyland, appear in the doc, however, the punk rock babes that most call attention are Kurt Cobain and his future wife Courtney Love. At that time, Courtney had a secret affair with Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. Kim Gordon is that kind of person who internalizes a lot of things for herself, and even when she tries to overflow, there’s a feeling that she’s still withdrawn, and we’ll never be truly intimate to her story. She points out why she doesn’t like Billy and Courtney. For her, Smashing was never punk rock and Courtney was a train-wreck . Her sharp opinions about the idols I admire didn’t bother me so much, after all, we also criticize the artists we don’t like. But there is something vague, which is not clarified when she doesn’t mince her words.
Kim writes her biography as a therapy, but not as a diary. Undoubtedly, one of the most exciting parts of the book is when she talks about Kurt. They had a fraternal, almost maternal relationship and she has always noticed his desire for annihilation projected on stage. In the film “Last Days” (2005) by the excellent filmmaker Gus Van Sant, Kim appears as a record company executive and is the only character to interact with the one inspired by Kurt Cobain in the last days of his life. The choice is fair : Kim was initially a huge icon for Kurt and although the two are rock stars, a rare and honest friendship was formed. “Kurt still accompanies me, in and out of me too, with his music (p.225).” The first four years of the 1990s were restless for Kim, on and off the stage, and the parallels she traced reinforced that she was much more than a girl in the band. When she recounts the journey of being a mother and a rock star — Thurston was described as a present father — we realize how difficult it was for her because she had her art projects, many people to harbor at home and to take care of Coco and her education.
In reporting the first decade of the 2000s, Sonic Youth’s ultimate , Kim feels things falling apart just like the fateful September 11, 2001. The Moore Gordon family had to move to New England and Kim suspected that the decision didn’t please Thurston. Coco was grown up and following her parents footsteps, while Thurston was becoming increasingly distant as a husband. Sonic made guest appearances on TV series like Gossip Girl and Gilmore Girls, but the cool couple attended therapy. Steve and Lee spent more time in New York in the studio whereas Thurston dedicated himself to Ecstatic Peace Library, an art and culture press, founded by him and his then lover, whom Kim chose not to reveal, but her name is Eva Prinz, and they have been together until these days.
The last great act of Sonic Youth took place in São Paulo, at SWU 2011. I watched the show on TV at the time and once again while reading the biography. Nothing felt more painful than seeing Kim’s world crashing. She sang most of the songs and didn’t even look at Thurston. Gordon has begun a new chapter in her life with her projects in art galleries and the experimental electric guitar duo composed by her and a long time friend, Bill, called Body / Head. The band has also collaborated with filmmaker and photographer, Richard Kern and there is an integration between the band and moving images reflected on their bodies. What Kim Gordon carries with her from Sonic Youth experience is the visceral sensation of playing and the realization that stage life doesn’t stray too far from real life, for as she herself said about her Aneurysm performance when Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, a burst of pain took over and the stages were Kim Gordon’s real diaries that she will always keep to herself.
Kool references found in Girl in a band:
Death Valley ’69 video for Bad Moon Rising album. Kim says the song is about how Charles Manson murdered the 1960s and its all peaceful and hippie ideology. As she herself puts it in the book: “[…] I would rather sing about the darkness that darkness shimmered beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture.”
Ciccone Youth — Sonic’s 1986 parallel project. Among the tracks on the “Whitey Album” was a cover of Madonna’s Into the Groove, as well as her picture on the album cover, and in the biography, Kim Gordon sees Madonna’s sexual revolution as unpretentious and that it was transformed into a male idea of marketing. Kim then rips the current pop artist Lana Del Rey, who in the same discussion about the image of pop singers on feminism, refers to Lana as ignorant since what she preaches is the self-destruction of women.
1991: The Year Punk Broke — the beginning of the friendship between Kim and Kurt Cobain. The connection between Kim and Kurt was much stronger than between him and Thurston. Kim recalls the late musician and friend as a fun company and how they were together all the time during the tour. To her, the union between Kurt and Courtney Love symbolized the annihilation he sought.
X-Girl — the clothing line that went from cult to popular in Japan.
In 1993, Kim Gordon’s life was certainly hectic: Her clothing line marked parades alongside prominent figures such as Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, who were married at the time, and Beastie Boys. In addition, she founded alongside her great friend and guitarist from Pussy Galore, Julia Cafritz, the musical project, Free Kitten. And as if that were not enough, she was pregnant of her first and only daughter, Coco.
Last Sonic Youth Show at SWU 2011- “My about-to-be ex-husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.”
Kim singing Aneurysm of Nirvana at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. “Kurt was the most intense artist I had ever seen.At the show, I just thought about how I wanted to pass the same kind of audacity to the audience.I sang “Aneurysm,” with its chorus, “Beat me out of me” bringing all my own anger and heartache over the last few years — a 4-minute blast of pain where I could finally allow myself to feel the fury of Kurt’s death and all that surrounded it. (p.284) “
- This post was originally published in Portuguese in my other blog account below:
https://thebelljarsgirl.blogspot.com/2019/01/resenha-girl-in-band-kim-gordon-2015.html
* except for Anne DeMarinis, who took over the keyboards and backing vocals for very little time in the band, leaving before the eponymous debut album.
** or any other gender identification.
